Today in the Garden

I got some nice stuff out of the garden tonight.  The tomatoes are ripening up nicely.  I'll be making sauce again pretty soon if the weather stays nice.  It looks like it should - the forecast says sunny and 80's for the next four days.  No rain, so I'll have to get on the watering. 

The beans (Kentucky Wonder pole beans) are starting to flower again.  They'd pretty much stopped producing for a while.  It may have been too cool for them to set blossoms.  It looks like I'll have a nice crop in a week or two.  I'm going to let some of the last pods mature and dry, and save the seeds to plant next year. 

I'm starting to contemplate getting the garden beds ready for winter.  I didn't clean one of the beds up too well last fall and had a batch of cutworms this spring.  They're disgusting.  They eat through the stems of small plants at ground level.  That's it.  They don't eat up the leaves, just eat enough of the stem to completely destroy the plant.  I lost beets and romaine to them. I'll be collaring my young plantlings this coming spring, but seedlings are a bit tougher to protect.  I found that the best method was to dig out the roots of the plant that was severed the previous night, find the little bugger - he'll be close to the roots of the plant - and squash him.  It's definitely a satisfying thing to do, of a little gross.  They're fat, juicy 1.5" furless catepillars.  I understand that cleaning the beds well in teh fall will help prevent this.  The bed that got infested had quite a bit of detritus left in it.

I'm going to be looking at where I want my new beds pretty soon.  I want a big bed for strawberries.  I've got a couple of June-bearing plants that are lost in a bed of grass and weeds, and they need a better home.  I want a few more beds for veggies, and some room for pumpkins, gourds and sweet corn.  I've got room for at least 60 square feet more of raised beds inside my current garden space, and as much of a couple acres as I want to use outside of it.  That would pretty much double my space.  I've got two 4 ft x 4 ft beds, a 1 ft x 16ft bed and a 1 ft x 8ft bed - 56 square feet in all.  It produces a fair amount of stuff.  Right now I've got 7 tomato plants, 5 feet of beans, one cucumber, 5 peppers, 100+ carrots, 5 dozen beets or so, a couple of potato plants, some lettuce...  We've got a variety in that small space, and enough coming out to provide for our veggie needs for now, but not really enough to put any up. 

Next year I'll have space to grow veggies for storage, so I'll be making some different choices.  It's fun to ponder what next year's garden will look like.


FT